Hydroponics is the soilless growing of plants. Hydroponics is an especially useful technique for producing food for livestock. The advantages of the use of hydroponics to produce live stock feed are that fresh feed is available all year, the feed that is available is free from undesirable materials such as weeds, wild garlic and onion plants, insects, dust, insecticides, radioactive fallout, to name a few. The product is also free of soil so that animals can eat the entire plant, root and all.
Properly designed hydroponic devices can yield an enormous output of plant material in a short time. The yield is large and quick because of the opportunity to control germination, temperature, light, and fertilizer for the growth of plants. It is not unusual to produce a 9-inch growth of grass from barley seed in seven days and the growth of grass produces a seven-fold increase in weight over the seeds that were employed. The hydroponically grown grass also contains vitamins, minerals, and other nutritional requirements that are not present in the seeds.
Hydroponic devices generally are less expensive per unit of yield than growing material in an open field. They are less expensive from the capital investment point of view because it is not necessary to own large amounts of land to grow things hydroponically. They are also less expensive from an operational point of view because high yields can be obtained without the labor and equipment necessary to till, fertilize, and harvest plants from fields. However, hydroponic growth of plant materials is not without its problems.
Among the problems involved with hydroponic growth of plant materials are that the ideal growing conditions within a hydroponic device is very attractive to undesirable plant species such as fungus, the different stages the plant material goes through in passing from seed to maturity requires different conditions that cannot always be achieved within the same device, and the uniform exposure of all the material to light, moisture, temperature, and other conditions is difficult to maintain throughout the entire growing cycle.